ClamDrinker @ ClamDrinker @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

It's a bit of a flawed comparison (AI vs a hammer) - but let me try.

If you put a single nail into wood with a hammer, which anyone with a hammer can also do, and even a hammer swinging machine could do without human input, you can't protect it.

If you put nails into wood with the hammer so that it shows a face, you can protect it. But you would still not be protecting the process of the single nail (even though the nail face is made up of repeating that process many times), you would specifically be protecting the identity of the face made of nails as your human artistic expression.

To bring it back to AI, if the AI can do it without sufficient input from a human author (eg. only a simple prompt, no post processing, no compositing, etc) it's likely not going to be protectable, since anyone can take the same AI model, use the same prompt, and get the same or very similar result as you did (which would be the equivalent of putting a single nail into the wood).

Take the output, modify it, refine it, composite it, and you're creating the hammer equivalent of a nail face. The end result was only possible because of your human input, and that means it can be protected.

The opinion of Hexbear doesn't seem to be the problem, and because of certain ideological overlap to users here that should be quite obvious in my opinion. You seem to have focused on the wrong part of the OP.

The problem is that they are presenting themselves as an ideological army. And especially that the admins of Hexbear seem to support this position, rather than it just being some rogue users.

Imagine if a Lemmy instance opened up for a specific religion and their whole point was to inject themselves into as many discussions as possible to push information favorable to their religion. The problem isn't that they believe in their religion, or even that they want to make the best case possible for it. It's the fact that they are trying to wield open discussions as a sword to convert people regardless of relevance or appropriateness.

Of course you are. There's nothing wrong with defending your beliefs, or advocating for them in the right context. Especially if they have sound arguments to back them up. (Also, I don't see any indication why that wouldn't be allowed based on this post, or the rules of conduct)

But pushing your beliefs is different. It's about foregoing actually convincing people and instead using underhanded tactics such as propaganda, brigading, or botting to make an opinion seem more sound than it really is. (Not saying your opinion necessarily is, by the way.)

11+ years, lurked longer than that. It's probably easier to make the change to Lemmy if you've seen the descent.

A mass exodus doesn't really happen in the traditional sense unless shit really hits the fan. For that to happen a large majority or even everyone has to be displaced at once and there can be no way to salvage the situation. In this case, there were a lot of short term ways out here for users not directly affected.

But, the whole situation is more akin to a war of attrition. The ones not convinced by the big things, will be convinced by the smaller things that accumulate over time. Goodwill for reddit is at an all time low, which hampers their ability to grow since word of mouth is effectively dead. People that provided effective labour for reddit in the form of moderation or content aggregation lost their morale to continue. Not all of them for sure, but it might very well be a critical mass (even if they didn't move to lemmy).

It's like a line of dominos increasing in size, if the ones that fell now were big enough to topple the next, eventually there will be a ripple effect. Eventually the quality of content goes down, the discourse turns stale and antagonistic, and communities fall apart. Only once the users who took the easy way out now realize that will they finally start the process of moving. And if reddit was doing so bad they had to make this move, I can only assume their future will be very grim indeed. The seed of destruction has been planted. (And if you want an example of that future, look at Twitter)

Whether or not that all actually happens, I'm not sure. I'd like to believe it will, but some people revel in their unreasonableness, and they're often the easiest to exploit for financial gain. I think the best thing is to stop looking back, and focus on what we have here and now. I think what lemmy has achieved so far is already more valuable than reddit had.

I mostly see psychological benefits:

• Building confidence in writing and (when roleplaying) in interacting with other people. LLMs dont shame, or get needlessly hostile. And since they follow your own style it can feel like talking to a friend.
• related to that, the ability to help in processing traumatic events through writing about them.

For me personally, interacting with AI has helped me conquer some fears and shame that I buried long ago.

You can't mitigate a man in the middle attack on a technical level... Because they are a man in the middle... That's the point of using DDoS mitigation. Nothing's stopping them from just sending incoming traffic to a phishing site if a bad actor was in control of it.

That's easier said than done, DDoS mitigation requires a large amount of servers that are only really useful to persist an active DDoS attack. It's why everyone uses Cloudflare, because of the amount of customers they serve there's pretty much always an active attack to fend off. Decentralization wouldn't work great for it because you would have to trust every decentralized node not to perform man in the middle attacks. But if you know of any such solution I'd love to hear it.

That's an eventual goal, which would be a general artificial intelligence (AGI). Different kind of AI models for (at least some) of the things you named already exist, it's just that OpenAI had all their eggs in the GPT/LLM basket, and GPTs deal with extrapolating text. It just so happened that with enough training data their text prediction also started giving somewhat believable and sometimes factual answers. (Mixed in with plenty of believable bullshit). Other data requires different training data, different models, and different finetuning, hence why it takes time.

It's highly likely for a company of OpenAI's size (especially after all the positive marketing and potential funding they got from ChatGPT in it's prime), that they already have multiple AI models for different kinds of data either in research, training, or finetuning already.

But even with all the individual pieces of an AGI existing, the technology to cross reference the different models doesn't exist yet. Because they are different models, and so they store and express their data in different ways. And it's not like training data exists for it either. And unlike physical beings like humans, it doesn't have any kind of way to "interact" and "experiment" with the data it knows to really form concrete connections backed up by factual evidence.

As long as humans are still the driving force behind what content gets spread around (and thus, far more represented in the training data), even if the content is AI generated, it shouldn't matter. But it's quite definitely not the case here.

I had YT premium for a while, and then I just wanted to download some videos (you know, like they advertise you can) and they just didnt allow it. Had to either watch it in the YT app or on youtube.com on my PC. That's not downloading - thats just streaming with less computation for youtube, which helps youtube but not me. What a great 'premium benefit'!

Cancelled my premium right then and there, if they cant provide a feature as simple as just being able to download videos to mp4 or something, thats just misleading. Literally takes seconds to find a third party site or app (NewPipe) that does it.

You're shifting the goal post. You wanted an AI that can learn stuff while it's being used and now you're unhappy that one existed that did so in a primitive form. If you want a general artificial intelligence that is also able to understand the words it says, we are still decades off. For now it can simply only work off patterns, for which the training data needs to be curated. And as explained previously, it's not infringing on copyright to train things on publicized works. You are simply denying that fact because you don't want that to be true, but it is. And that's why your sentiment isn't shared outside of some anti-AI circle you're part of.

The biggest users of AI are techbros who think that spending half an hour crafting a prompt to get stable diffusion to spit out the right blend of artists’ labor are anywhere near equivalent to the literal collective millions of man hours spent by artists honing their skill in order to produce the content that AI companies took without consent or attribution and ran through a woodchipper. Oh, and corporations trying to use AI to replace artists, writers, call center employees, tech support agents…

So because you don't know any creative people who use the technology ethically, they don't exist? Good to hear you're sticking it up for the little guy who isn't making headlines or being provocative. I don't necessarily see these as ethical uses either, but I would be incredibly disingenuous to insinuate these are the only and primary ways to use AI - They are not, and your ignorance is showing if you actually believe so.

Frankly, I’m absolutely flabbergasted that the popular sentiment on Lemmy seems to be so heavily in favor of defending large corporations taking data produced en masse by individuals without even so much as the most cursory of attribution (to say nothing of consent or compensation) and using it for the companies’ personal profit. It’s no different morally or ethically than Meta hoovering all of our personal data and reselling it to advertisers.

I'm sorry, but you realize that this doesn't make any sense right? Large corporations are the ones who would have enough information and/or money at their disposal to train their own AIs without relying on publicized works. Should any kind of blockade be created to stop people training AI models from using public work, you would effectively be taking AI away from the masses in the form of Open Source models, not from those corporations. So if anything, it's you who is arguing for large corporations to have a monopoly on AI technology as it currently is.

Don't think I actually like companies like OpenAI or Meta, it's why I've been arguing about AI models in general, not their specific usage of the technology (As that is a whole different can of worms).

The AI models (not specifically OpenAI's models) do not contain the original material they were trained on. Just like the creators of Undertale consumed the games they were inspired by into their brain, and learned from them, so did the AI learn from the material it was trained on and learned how to make similar yet distinctly different output. You do not need a permissive license to learn from something once it has been publicized.

You can't just put your artwork up on a wall and then demand every person who looks at it to not learn from it while simultaneously allowing them to look at it because you have a license that says learning from it is not allowed - that's insane and hence why (as far as I know) no legal system acknowledges that as a legal defense.

You realize LLMs are designed not to self improve by design right? It's totally possible and has been tried - It's just that they usually don't end up very well once they do. And LLMs do learn new things, they're just called new models. Because it takes time and resources to retrain LLMs with new information in mind. It's up to the human guiding the AI to guide it towards something that isn't copyright infringement. AIs don't just generate things on their own without being prompted to by a human.

You're asking for a general intelligence AI, which would most likely be comprised of different specialized AIs to work together. Similar to our brains having specific regions dedicated to specific tasks. And this just doesn't exist yet, but one of it's parts now does.

Also, you say "right" and "probable" are without difference, yet once again bring something into the conversation which can only be "right". Code. You cannot create code that is incorrect or it will not work. Text and creative works cannot be wrong. They can only be judged by opinions, not by rule books which say "it works" or "it doesn't".

The last line is just a bit strange honestly. The biggest users of AI are creative minds, and it's why it's important that AI models remain open source so all creative minds can use them.

Also, it should be mentioned that pretty much all games are in some form derivative works. Lets take Undertale since I'm most familiar with it. It's well known that Undertale takes a lot of elements from other games. RPG mechanics from Mother and Earthbound. Bullet hell mechanics from games like Touhou Project. And more from games like Yume Nikki, Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, Cave Story. And funnily enough, the creator has even cited Mario & Luigi as a potential inspiration.

So why was it allowed to exist without being struck down? Because it fits the definition of a derivative works to the letter. You can find individual elements which are taken almost directly from other games, but it doesn't try to be the same as what it was created after.

You seem to misunderstand what an LLM does. It doesn't generate "right" text. It generates "probable" text. There's no right or wrong since it only generates a single word ahead of where it currently is. Hence why it can generate information that's complete bullshit. I don't know the details about this Go AI you're talking about, but it's pretty safe to say it's not an LLM or uses a similar technique to it as Go is a game and not a creative work. There are many techniques for creating algorithms that fall under the "AI" umbrella.

Your second point is a whole different topic. I was referring to a "derivative work", which is not the same as "fair use". Derivative works are quite literally everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work A derivative work doesn't require fair use, as it no longer falls under the same copyright as the original. While fair use is an exception under which copyrightable work can be used without infringing.

And also, those projects most of the time do not get shut down because they are actually illegal, but they get shut down because companies with tons of money can send threatening letters all day and have a team of high quality lawyers to send them. A cease and desist isn't a legal enforcement from a judge, it's a "recommendation for us not to (attempt to) sue you". And that works on most small projects. It very very rarely goes to court over these things. And sometimes it's because it's totally warranted. Especially for fan projects it's extremely hard to completely erase all protected copyrightable work, since they are specifically made to at least imitate or expand upon what they're a fan project of.

EDIT: Minor clarification

That's incorrect. Sure it has no comprehension of what the words it generates actually means, but it does understand the patterns that can be found in the words. Ask an AI to talk like a pirate, and suddenly it knows how to transform words to sound pirate like. It can also combine data from different text about similar topics to generate new responses that never existed in the first place.

Your analogy is a little flawed too, if you mixed all the elements in a transformative way and didn't re-use any materials as-is, even if you called it Mazefecootviltale, as long as the original material were transformed sufficiently, you haven't infringed on anything. LLMs don't get trained to recreate existing works (which would make it only capable of producing infringing works), but to predict the best next word (or even parts of a word) based on the input information. It's definitely possible to guide an AI towards specific source materials based on keywords that only exist in the source material that could be infringing, but in general it generates so generalized that it's inherently transformative.

P2P exposes your IP to those you need to connect to. So if you're a streamer or something - share a file and you dox yourself. It also means if you're offline you can't send the file.

It's just not practical over remotely hosted for it to be the default. There's other apps you can download if you still want to use P2P

The term has always been somewhat tongue in cheek, in part because it goes against the principles of PCMR to actually be elitist about liking PC. But also because it's a lightly mocking response to outside claims of superiority over PC that were rampant in the past (usually while lacking objective reasons for said superiority).

In my opinion, the term has grandfathered in to such a degree that it's relation to how Nazis used the word is kind of disingenuous to attach to PCMR at this point, since it's obvious the two uses aren't the same.

I also don't really blame the fact the name was kept, because that's what people migrating will be looking for. If they can't find it easily, someone else is just going to make it and the community will split. Who knows though, if people agree, maybe Lemmy will provide an option to rename the community - once it's grown large enough or something.